Heartland Institute Launches ClimateRealism.com

This new website will debunk the alarmist climate propaganda that dominates the media’s coverage of the environment

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (March 19, 2020) – The Heartland Institute is proud to announce ClimateRealism.com, a new website that debunks climate scares perpetuated in the media. ClimateRealism.com is Heartland’s second new climate website launched this month; ClimateAtAGlance.com debuted last week.

Nearly every day, the establishment media promotes new climate propaganda themes designed to scare people into believing a climate crisis is at hand. When the Climate Scare goes unrebutted, people are likely to believe by default that the propaganda is true. Yet most of the media’s climate propaganda is misleading or outright false. ClimateRealism.com will address and debunk the media’s most prominent climate-related tall tales.

“The alarmist Climate Delusion depends on people being uninformed or misinformed,” said Heartland Institute President James Taylor. “ClimateRealism.com will provide policymakers, media, and the general public with timely and easy-to-understand information that debunks media-peddled climate scares. No longer will the public have to blindly accept the climate propaganda they see on television or read on the internet.”

“With updates provided in response to these scares, people will want to make ClimateRealism.com a part of their daily internet routine,” Taylor added.

Regular updates at ClimateRealism.com will feature concise Heartland-authored articles, as well as summaries and links to articles written by other climate realists. The regular articles are designed to explain the truth behind the media’s climate scares in a clear, succinct manner. Links within the articles will direct readers to supporting facts and information.

ClimateRealism.com will also serve as a portal linking to additional climate resources, such as Heartland’s new Climate-at-a-Glance website. ClimateAtAGlance.com provides compelling, easy to digest one- and two-page summaries of frequently discussed climate issues, such as hurricanes, droughts, species impacts, and more. The summaries are particularly valuable for policymakers, teachers, and students.

The Heartland Institute is a 36-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. The Economist magazine called Heartland “the leading think tank promoting skepticism of man-caused climate change.” The organization has sponsored 13 International Conferences on Climate Change and published the 6,000-page Climate Change Reconsidered series by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

It’s not for them. It’s for people who don’t really know much, who just repeat lines they’ve heard from friends without understanding. Here is a place (I hope!) where you can go for some facts which may make them reconsider or at least have some doubt.

“I am relieved to see policy makers treating the coronavirus threat with the urgency it deserves. They need to do the same when it comes to an even greater underlying threat: human-caused climate change.
In a recent column (“I’m skeptical about climate alarmism, but I take coronavirus fears seriously,” Ideas, March 15), Jeff Jacoby sought to reconcile his longstanding rejection of the wisdom of scientific expertise when it comes to climate with his embrace of such expertise when it comes to the coronavirus.
In so doing, Jacoby took my words out of context, mischaracterizing my criticisms of those who overstate the climate threat “in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability, and hopelessness.”
As I have pointed out in past commentaries, the truth is bad enough when it comes to the devastating impacts of climate change, which include unprecedented floods, heat waves, drought, and wildfires that are now unfolding around the world, including the United States and Australia, where I am on sabbatical.
The evidence is clear that climate change is a serious challenge we must tackle now. There’s no need to exaggerate it, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.
There is still time to avoid the worst outcomes, if we act boldly now, not out of fear, but out of confidence that the future is still largely in our hands. That sentiment hardly supports Jacoby’s narrative of climate change as an overblown problem or one that lacks urgency.
While we have only days to flatten the curve of the coronavirus, we’ve had years to flatten the curve of CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, thanks in part to people like Jacoby, we’re still currently on the climate pandemic path.
Michael E. Mann
State College, Pa.
The writer is a professor at Penn State University, where he is director of the Earth System Science Center.”

Michael Mann,
There is no objective scientific evidence of severe, detrimental changes to the Australian climate history, since 1900 or so.
There might have been a national warming of about half a degree C in that time, but the observations are not good enough to confirm this.
There has been no increase in flood severity.
There has been no increase in heatwave length, intensity or frequency in our Capital cities, home to the vast majority of Australians (with some minor exceptions).
The 2019-20 wild fires were severe, but not substantially worse than other bad fires since 1900.
Droughts are forever with us. The “Federation Drought” around 1900 was as bad as any later drought, when viewed using several main criteria.
The frequency and intensity of cyclones making landfall since 1900 has more likely decreased than worsened.
There are many published, peer-reviewed papers that support my broad contentions here. They are easy to find, a chore to list here. There are also papers supporting Dr Mann. The main reason for the contradiction is probably related to use of historic data unfit for the purpose of past climate reconstruction.
Attributions like an event being X% worse because of climate change are silly and beyond the ability of science to show. They are simply personal opinions dressed up.

The pity is that Australian officials, who must be well aware of reality, are inclined to avoid endorsement of papers opposing Dr Mann’s wishful thinking. Maybe their support of global warming hypotheses was getting too wishy-washy so Dr Mann visited here to give people pep talks. Sadly for him, Science does not progress by pep talks. Geoff S

Geoff, It has all become talk. At least they once offered scientific arguments, but with most of these handily debunked, they now have fallen back on repetitive, information free talking points as advised by the great propagandists of the 20th Century.

“While rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the air can be beneficial for plants, it is also the chief culprit of climate change. The gas, which traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere, has been increasing since the industrial age due to the burning of oil, gas, coal and wood for energy and is continuing to reach concentrations not seen in at least 500,000 years. The impacts of climate change include global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice as well as more severe weather events.

The beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide on plants may also be limited, said co-author Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suv-Yvette, France. “Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time.””https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth

As usual, when Jack actually does try to present something that looks like facts, he manages to say nothing that is actually true.

If the climate did warm, some insects might get more active, however the insects that eat insects also get more active. Regardless, how much more active will insects get when the world warms by less than half a degree.

Another half truth, yes the average amount of protein in plants has gone done in a few experiments that were carefully designed to show that affect. However the total amount of plant mass more than makes up for it.

Out here in the real world, no plant has ever shown an “acclimatization” to higher CO2 levels. Once again Jack relies on inuendo and outright falsehoods to try and support what has been paid to support.

Climate scientists, including all highly credentialed, are not automatically qualified to comment on warming trends in temperature records, nor are they necessarily qualified as “peers” to validate the analysis of warming trends presented by others.

One peer group for analyzing temperature readings, such as the near-Billion-recordings in GHCN, are data mavins, professionals, those of us (I am qualified) who understand how to parse, compute, index, and graph huge datasets. We are experts at detecting false conclusions and slick tricks in statistics.

Anyone, such as you, Mr Dale, heavily invested in the fallacy of Appeal To Authority, cannot escape the reality that the non-climate scientist peer group has exposed truths which refute the false peer group. For instance, how the model-building believers of Tyndall et al have been nullified by the hard data to the contrary, which refuses to conform to the models.

You have a fairly typical naive view of appeal to authority. There are legitimate reasons to accept the views of authorities.

“Be very careful not to confuse “deferring to an authority on the issue” with the appeal to authority fallacy. Remember, a fallacy is an error in reasoning. Dismissing the council of legitimate experts and authorities turns good skepticism into denialism. The appeal to authority is a fallacy in argumentation, but deferring to an authority is a reliable heuristic that we all use virtually every day on issues of relatively little importance. There is always a chance that any authority can be wrong, that’s why the critical thinker accepts facts provisionally. It is not at all unreasonable (or an error in reasoning) to accept information as provisionally true by credible authorities. ”

BTW, a few posts up Jack got quite offended when I pointed out that he wasn’t thinking for himself.
Now he tells us that we need to “defer” to those he considers authorities.
In other words, just do as you are told and don’t think for yourself.

Not only did you not address my challenge — the proper peer group — your citing of the extended explanation of Appeal to Authority only sinks your ship faster. The link and quote from your source is pathetic. It attempts to validate Appeals on their face as the default confirmation, with a mild advisory of remote possibility of error. That is laughable.

Automatic default reifying of one council as legitimate experts to the exclusion of others by The Argument From Intimidation turns good cross-checking into political membership by confirmation bias.

Especially when the validation of the Authority in question here has been nullified by reality.

You claim ““The theory is that rising sea-surface temperatures should make hurricanes more frequent or more intense or both. But observational data shows that there is no empirical evidence to support the theory.””

A significant global increase (95% significance level) can be found in all storms with maximum wind speeds from 175 km/h. Storms of 200 km/h and more have doubled in number, and those of 250 km/h and more have tripled. Although some of the trend may be owing to improved observation techniques, this provides some evidence that a global increase in the most intense tropical storms due to global warming is not just predicted by models but already happening.

However, global warming does not only increase the wind speed or frequency of strong storms (which is actually two ways of looking at the same phenomenon, as frequency depends on wind speed). The average location where the storms are reaching their peak intensity is also slowly migrating poleward (Kossin et al. 2014) and the area where storms occur expands (Benestad 2009, Lucas et al. 2014), which changes patterns of storm risk and increases risk in regions that are historically less threatened by these storms (Kossin et al. 2016).

Most damage caused by tropical storms is not directly caused by the wind, but by water: rain from above, storm surge from the sea. Harvey brought the largest amounts of rain in US history – the probability of such a rain event has increased several times over recent decades due to global warming (Emanuel 2017; Risser and Wehner, 2017; van Oldenborgh et al., 2017). Not least due to global warming, sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate and storm surges are becoming more dangerous. A recent study (Garner et al. 2017), for example, shows that the return period of a certain storm surge height in New York City will be reduced from 25 years today to 5 years within the next three decades. Therefore, storm surge barriers are the subject of intensive discussion in New York (Rahmstorf 2017).

“Mr Homewood’s pamphlet also cites a review paper on ‘Tropical cyclones and climate change’ by Kevin Walsh and co-authors, but omits any acknowledgement of the following conclusion: “Confidence has now increased to ‘medium’ that in the Atlantic basin, external forcing factors such as anthropogenic greenhouse gases and aerosols are partly responsible for the increase in TC [tropical cyclone] formation since the comparatively quiescent 1970s–1980s”.”

As Mark said, there is no evidence there only some descriptions of temperature changes, etc.
They have just repeated the old worn out non facts.
It is obvious that you do not know what real evidence is so you just quote articles.
Start with: Show me ONE study that MEASURES temperature change due to CO2 or human caused CO2.
Answer: ZERO

MarkW, Authoritarianism is the name of the game, which is what you were rightly pointing out. He can only read what he’s allowed to read. Part of his indoctrination is to stick to the script. He doesn’t understand that it’s those people in ‘authority’ who are actually terrified that he might go off script and learn the truth, should he ever have the courage to do some real research.

Yet Jack, there are those of you who agree to ‘secret science’. As with Mann refusing to back up his science and policies being pushed though based on his research without any verification of his work. Aside from a peer group drawn from buddies and selected leftist thinkers. That’s simply rubber stamping.

It’s not that ‘we’ are keepers of the truth Jack, ‘we’ will, and indeed do readily put the truth ‘out there’, for others to confirm that we are correct. That’s how it’s supposed to happen, that’s how ‘we’ learn from each other.

This looks like an “anti-skepticalscience” website. A much needed balance. Without doubt, most people will dismiss it because it is from Heartland, therefore backed by oil money, and assumed to be false information. Wrong, but that is what they will think.
In order for this to be taken seriously, they need to invite alarmist debunkers to explain any errors in the information they present, and have discussions about how those things are interpreted or misrepresented.
Like the article there about NOAAs purposely flawed data. Many people will take issue with that claim and simply not believe it. But if somebody tries to prove it to be a false claim and can’t, then there is a higher degree of validity.

Congratulations Heartlands Institute! Every step towards a more rational, science-based approach to global warming is to be applauded. I see this very much as a supportive adjunct to Anthony’s award-winning and much-respected blog.

Key will be to QUICKLY respond to the faux science and lunacy we are presented with on a daily basis by the BBC and others. At election times, certainly in the UK, the opposing parties run a ‘rapid rebuttal’ service to misleading and overblown stories in the media.

We need to support this initiative by emailing examples of the usual global warming nonsense that we regularly see in the media to this new website .

It would help the site ClimateRealism.com if it were secured. The site ClimateAtAGlance.com has the handy https in front.
Other than that, I applaud the dissemination of counterpoint information to the overblown claims of the alarmists.

Speech Preaching for “The End of Climate Change Debate” by Stephen Heins

First, I was there during Dr. Michael Mann’s testimony on March 29, 2017 in front of the Committee of Science, Space, and Technology.

Mann was at his bullying, uncivil, and name-calling best. In fact, during the question and answer period, Mann denied calling fellow panelist Dr. Judith Curry a “denier” earlier interviews he gave. In response, Dr. Curry dryly comment Mann should read his own remarks.

Clearly, Penn State University’s Professor Michael Mann has no sense of humor, nor does he have a sense of irony and neither does Naomi Oreskes.

Speaking at the Annual of University of Michigan Event, Speech Award Winner Mann gave a speech preaching for “The End of Climate Change Debate,” after Michigan’s President Mark Schlissel introduced guest speaker Michael Mann by saying that the University of Michigan will always be “an inalienable forum for discovery, debate, and discussion.”

The site needs to run on HTTPS, two reasons: 1) it reduces the likelihood of other people ‘logging’ what you are reading; 2) Google will index it better in its rankings (they favour HTTPS websites over HTTP websites)

Now if you put HTTPS in front it switches to HTTPS, so someone has to configure the web server properly to switch HTTP over to HTTPS automatically (there are plugins for this on WordPress).

I think that Naomi Seibt deserves a lot of credit for promoting “Climate Realism”.
I don[‘t see much discussion of her on the thread of comments, but I haven’t looked around the actual site yet which I will do now. I think she deserves proper credit for this !!!

I agree with you Jon, she is an articulate and intelligent young lady. If she can capture the attention of large numbers of young people then the ‘Climate Realism’ site could really take off. Her audience would obviously be those less interested in emotional hysteria and those looking for some truth and balance.

Young people are less about tabloids and television news and more about online content anyway so she could potentially reach the people who need most to get through to.

People, not least youngsters still at school, have been disturbed, and in some case unhinged, by the relentless scaremongering about our CO2 emissions. They need help to get back on a more even keel by seeing just how feeble is the case for alarm, and how deceptive, often by omission, is the scare propaganda.

My first look around ClimateREALISM.com makes me think the folks behind it are going to make a massive contribution to the healing and recovering effort that I hope will spread far and wide.

If we crashed our economy over the fear of a virus, there’s really no point. The stupid is strong and the people weak. After watching the SARS CoV2 reaction, what’s the point? We are fools who have no desire to live or to live free. We are babies, hiding from shadows. It was a worthy effort, but obviously VERY VERY late in the game. Too late.

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